You know it may not be the best day of your life when you hear your doctor say, "There's a shadow on your x-ray."
I sat for a moment, trying to take it all in. Trying to determine on my own what it all meant. How it would affect my life; the time I have left; my day to day activities. I looked at the doctor.
"So, I should call and cancel today's tee time, I guess?"
The shadow was, and remains, an enlarged heart. The heart gets liberal in size because the blood likes to hang around long past its welcome. With it pumping out just 20-25 percent, blood loiters in the bottom of a ventricle and makes the heart grow beyond its normal size. That makes one seriously short of breath, tired and somehwat cranky. Now, this definition would likely never make it in the Journal of the American Medical Association, but it works for me and maybe other laymen.
So once we determined the heart was too big, a series of tests followed; all the tests performed confirmed those tests performed in the early going, last September. As October came in, my heart remained large and low performing and I grew quite tired of technicians spreading jelly on my chest to see if things had changed. I don't know how pregnant women do it ... let those techie people spread sticky goo on their stomach when they're pregnant. An EKG is a lot like a sonogram, except you rarely find a growing fetus in that part of the body.
Especially in male heart patients.
After the fact had been established that DCM and I would be close friends, there were certainly new life-altering guidelines that had to be followed ... immediately, if not sooner, which of course did nothing for my comfort level.
First, no salt. As in no pretzels, no chips or Tostitos or nothin'. Secondly, "Limit your fluid intake," the doc said. Of course, whenever you are told this, you become instantly thirsty for, like, 24 hours a day. And finally, no alcohol. Apparently, I wasn't even supposed to smell alcohol on someone else's breath. In summation, pretty much anything that goes good with a football game is off limits. Frankly, I'm surprised I'm allowed to watch football. Football would likely be off-limits, too, if I followed a team other than the Cowboys.
Salt is pretty much what food is all about in West Texas. We shower our tortilla chips with it before we dip them into salsa that is likely loaded, as well. If we opt for BBQ, I'm guessing that's not exactly heart friendly fare either.
Oh, and fluids are mostly out, or they will limit the effectiveness of the powerful diuretics. Roughly, I am permitted to take in about 48 ounces a day, the equivalent of four cans of soda. Which is about right since it takes about that much to down the legion of pills I am forced to take day and night.
Welcome to my nightmare.
Diuretecs, if you haven't heard, make you pee so that you cn get rid of what little fluid you have. Diuretics' main job is to constantly interrupt really good dreams. In fact, I had a dream the other night. I was falling from a tall building. In the middle of being rescued by Elastigirl, I looked up at her and said, "Hold on a sec, gotta go pee. And the I have to stand around and see if I need to jiggle the handle because we can't have a toilet running in the middle of bein' saved."
Comments